Cecilia
by Zenthisoror
Summary: Light is most certainly not going mad, even if sometimes it looks as if L's hair has a life of its own. (Crack, very much crack. Disclaimer since fanfic won't let me edit anymore: Characters property of the Death Note franchise, and thank you)
Spirals were perfect traps. If a man closed his eyes, he would walk, not straight, but in an ever-tightening spiral until he opened his eyes and found his feet turning, turning, turning, then tripping on the spot.

The point of a spiralling pinwheel's graceful inward movement was that it was an illusion. That was where it's inherent beauty lay, in the half-collapsing curves of their lines that the mind could trap its thoughts in at its leisure.

The whorl on the back of L's head, however, wasn't moving by any trick of the light or illusion. It had well and truly moved.

A fraction of a degree maybe, but it was still a fraction of a degree more than any hair on a man's head should have done.

Light squinted against the blue light of the laptop. L, hunched in his seat with his knees to his chin, was reading an article on its screen, scrolling through with lazy flicks of his right hand's forefinger whilst his left hand built a glittering tower out of cubes of Meltykiss.

It was a quiet enough night that Light could hear L's breathing over the whir of the laptop fan, and when Light blinked, swallowed and squinted again, the light meshing of his eyelashes, his breaths, the gulp of his spit, everything sounded too loud, including the gentle rustling of L's hair, as the more Light stared and strained his eyes against the blue light, the more certain he became that the entire ridiculous tangled mop of it was ever-so-slowly, but surely, in an anticlockwise motion rotating on his head.

Like a ceiling fan, or a dog turning in small circles to flatten its bedding.

It was turning, turning, turning, slow and languid, with only the softest hiss of sound, as though to the turns of an invisible screw, and all L did was stack his Meltykiss tower higher and gnaw on his thumb at whatever it was in the article as though nothing was out of the ordinary, as though it was Light's fault that he saw L's hair spinning as if on a bowl on L's head, as though Light was going mad.

Light was not going mad.

He couldn't even afford the possibility to cross his mind because, once it did, it would only be a matter of time before it crossed L's, if they didn't cross at the same time, and, as L still insisted that Light was Kira, Light needed to keep the head on his shoulders screwed on so firm and straight that he would have to be dead to lose it.

He was not going mad.

Perhaps it would be understandable if he did. He spent days and nights within the walls of a glass tower with L attached to him like a watchful ball and chain. Light 'losing it' was likely little more than another hazard of the workplace which L had no doubt accounted for.

The thought that anybody could predict Light well enough to 'account' for whatever he did was deeply unpleasant, disagreeable to say the least, especially if it was L. Light needed to be - to remain - the exception that he had gone through life knowing himself to be.

Exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally good, and exceptionally, most certainly, sane.

Even as he watched L's hair complete a rotation of his head and continue crawling on along its next.

Perhaps this was all just the phantom after-effects of a dream. An especially lucid and nonsensical one with stubbornly lingering traces that clung on to reality like smoke stains even as Light woke up. Perhaps a result of eye strain from staring at a monitor all day, exhaustion, or even something L might have had Watari slip in his food. It wouldn't have been the first time.

The mass of black hair turned in a sudden, sharp, very definite swivel, and bristled like a sea urchin.

Light closed his eyes, counted to three.

Opened them again.

Just in time to see a small, black, leathery pair of nostrils protrude on a stalk from amongst the hair like a snorkel, flutter with a soft whiffle, then sink back down amongst the curls, before a thin blue tongue with a forked tip flickered out to taste the air.

Light didn't dare move.

"Light-kun." He jumped. L had spoken without turning around, unwrapping a Meltykiss and tossing one, two, to the back of his mouth. "Do you need something?"

L's hair had stopped turning. If anything that only made it look poised, perched on L's head, waiting as though for some kind of signal.

"You've been staring at the back of my head for a good twelve minutes." L licked his fingertips, chasing the cocoa powder. "Is there something in my hair that bothers you?"

The whorl on the top of L's head began to slowly pinwheel again as the whole mass moved, but this time clockwise, in the opposite direction.

Light's heart tapped, tapped and picked up pace as if to the turn of a dial. "No. Nothing. There's nothing in your hair. Nothing at all."

And no, it didn't bother him. That L's hair had stiffened, prickled at the sound of his voice like an animal catching a scent on the wind, didn't bother him in the slightest. That he couldn't bring himself to look away, to uncurl his fingers from the sheets, to even move, didn't bother him, because all he had to do was satisfy his curiosity enough to look away and then it would stop.

No more laptop lights, no more slow rotation of the entirety of L's scalp, no more bristling tufts of hair that the more Light looked the more they looked as though they were curling and uncurling in prehensile tendrils like tiny black tentacles.

If only he could look away.

But spirals were perfect traps and Light had already been ensnared. And he couldn't blink, couldn't breathe, couldn't turn, every muscle behind his eyes, throat, face, neck, in the fingers digging into the sheets, coiled too tight to unwind as the pinwheel spiral of L's hair wound in slow, syrupy whorls like the ripples L stirred up on the surface of his tea.

 _Close your eyes, Light._

 _Look away._

Turn away and crawl out of the spiral and this would all stop, and he would sleep with his fingernails sunk in his palms and his ribs too tight and his heart too loud, everything like the hunted animal that Kira was, which with the mind of a human made it a monster.

Then Light would open his eyes and it would be another morning - and nothing would have changed. He would still be on this spiral path of the Kira case that for so long had been motionless, with only a listless illusion of pinwheel movement, spinning and tossing them all to a singularity, at which there was nothing but…what?

 _Lies._

 _Crushing oblivion._

Lies! It was all lies! Cold and cruelly spinning them together in a happy illusion because the thought that they were still and stuck in stasis was death in itself, and _it did not do_ to linger, to stay still, to think that they would die.

Always movement, even if it wasn't real.

Always movement, even if it was nothing more than a design.

Because every spiral path was a trap, dragging the gaze down…

 _And Light was not going mad._

The hair bristled again, and he stiffened. His skin, his teeth, his bones, everything felt cold and too awake, too heavy, too real for this to be a dream.

 _He was exceptionally, most certainly, sane._

 _Close your eyes, Light. Look away_.

In the mass of blue-black hair, like a shell in a swallow's nest, blinked an eye.

Smooth and clammy-looking, it was black and staring, all too much like the eyes that were currently fixed on a laptop screen. It watched Light now from under a fringe of unruly dark hair.

"You're still staring." L paused in his scrolling but he still didn't turn away from the laptop. "Is there a problem?"

The eye in L's hair began a baleful, circular drift along with the rest of the rotating body, and Light found himself matching the eye, stare for stare, mesmerised by the movement and the truly aimless spiral of its motion.

"Light?"

 _Your hair._ That's all Light needed to say. _Your hair. Do something with that hair. Wash it. Bin it. Kill it. Please do something with your hair before it breeds and, please, please, look this way so that I don't need to look at it anymore._

It was all so easy. It was all on the tip of Light's tongue.

The whole mass of hair slipped off L's head and dropped to the floor.

Horror swelled within him and closed his throat, as L's hair slithered across the floor with a faint scuttling sound as though on thousands of tiny chitinous legs, rippling in the blue-white light of the laptop like seaweed undulating in a current, and before Light could even think to move, run, get away, it had crawled up onto the bed with a dry, hairy whisper.

And now there were two eyes in the black, shadowy mass of hair, pinning him in place with its gaze as Light watched it draw closer, closer, closer still. A moment later, there were three, eyes budding black and white, and then there were six in a boiled egg cluster, all round and dark.

L's hair perched at the bottom of Light's bed. The shaggy mass had claws. He couldn't see them, but he could feel them pricking against the sheets, and as one came too close and dug against his ankle, Light found his voice at last.

"L…" the six eyes rolled as one to fix on him, round and unblinking, "L, your hair – "

The hair thing split wide, and suddenly, all that Light could see at the bottom of his bed was a wide, black, gaping mouth, filled with a ring of sharp white teeth, bared at Light in a bear-trap smile, and in the blue-white light reflected off L's shining bald head, it slipped over the sheets towards him –

* * *

Light woke up in the dark with a start and fumbled for the switch, turned on the light.

L was fast asleep in his chair with his arms hanging down on either side of the armrests, breathing quietly into his chest.

The hair thing had returned to its place on top of its master's head.

 _No,_ Light stopped himself from reaching for the lamp on the side-table (to throw at it, to get it away, away and off L's head) with some effort, and forced himself to look, _not a hair thing._

No strange restless circling movement, no drifting, spiralling pinwheel. It was just hair. A bush of black, tangled, matted hair which probably ate and spat out combs but didn't need teeth to do it.

It was just L. And his hair. L's hair.

Light relaxed his grip on the sheets and felt the blood rush back into his fingers with a pins and needles tingle. They creaked when he stretched them. His palms burned from when his nails had dug into them.

He let out a long slow breath.

Eyes blinked, wide, black and round.

Light jumped with a cry, then felt immediately felt foolish when L frowned at him.

"I believe it was Light-kun who was complaining about not being able to get a so-called 'good night's sleep' and yet he seems to be foregoing sleep in favour of spending valuable sleeping time looking at me."

"I wasn't looking at you!" The words tumbled out in a swirling rush like water pinwheel spiralling down a plughole, and Light sighed and closed his eyes.

"Really?" The chain of the handcuff slapped against the side of L's chair. "How strange. I had the distinct feeling that somebody was staring at me, or more precisely, my hair, for a good few minutes. If it wasn't Light-kun, I wonder who it was."

"Who knows?" Light folded his arms beneath his head, settled back against his pillow and concentrated on his breathing, on his heart rate, on the sheen of sweat on his neck that he was ready to justify in thirteen different ways. "Maybe the case is finally getting to you, Ryuuzaki."

"Oh, I have no doubts that the case is getting to me. I must have slept," L held up three fingers and said impressively, "a whole solid three minutes. What is the world coming to? The next thing you know, I might actually die on this."

"Don't say things like that – "

Light froze, the words stuck, because as L turned away to pick at his ear, buried deep in the dark hair Light saw a baleful, round eye, staring wide and black and back at him –

At the frantic jangling of the chain and the sawing of the cuff at his wrist, L turned around, to find Light unplugging the lamp from his side-table with a stony expression that might have been grim determination if his eyes hadn't looked so disconcertingly _glazed_.

"Light?" Light paused, the lamp in his hands, unseeing. "If you were going to kill me, it would've been easier in my sleep, but I should warn you that the entirety of this is being recorded and should some harm occur to my person, you will never set foot outside this building again without a straitjacket and a blindfold."

"I'm not going to kill you," Light's white-knuckled grip shifted and tightened as he inched across the bed on his knees, his eyes wide and white, still fixed on L's head. No, not head – his hair. "I'm just going to get rid of that thing on your head."

"What thing?"

Light swung the lamp up over his shoulder. "A parasite. Keep still."

"A parasite? You mean this thing?"

L reached up and, in one light tug, lifted the hair off his head.

All Light could do was stare, stare and stare. L held up his hair in one hand and underneath it was as bald and naked as the moon. He didn't know which to look at first: The hair thing, waving its hundreds of black clawed feet in the air like an uncurled millipede and making high-pitched squealing noises, or L's shining, bald, perfect dome of a pate as smooth, bald and shiny as had it been rubbed for luck by tourists.

L dangled the hair thing in Light's face by its scruff. Light recoiled. Millimetres from his nose, it bubbled with eyes like blisters.

"This is Cecilia." The hair thing bobbed and swayed in L's hand, hissing with displeasure at being manhandled before fixing its gaze on Light with all the same accusing suspicion as its master. "Cecilia is my hair. Cecilia, this is Light. Light is my suspect. Do not eat him, or any pieces of him, when you think I'm not looking."

The hair thing's whole body split wide into that great fang-toothed smile, which was far more fang than smile, and Light couldn't hold back any longer.

He swung the lamp with a scream.


End file.
